Non-process thinking failure
Our own research (Edwards & Kidd, 2003) also included the example of a manufacturing company, referred to as MakeIt in the paper, which had a goal of being seen as a learning organisation. MakeIt’s management had a very top-down approach to knowledge management. They had identified that one knowledge management issue was a lack of knowledge sharing, and thought that better IT support, in this case in the form of groupware, was the way to address this issue. The decision to implement a groupware system was taken with little or no analysis of how knowledge sharing currently took place, or how MakeIt’s workforce would like it to happen, i.e. the relevance to the business processes. Perhaps not surprisingly, only one group of staff within MakeIt wanted to share knowledge using a groupware system; they were the IT staff who were responsible for implementing that system.
